A non-fairy tale heroine: Queen Anahit of The Golden Bracelet

The resource here is for using with ‘East of the Sun West of the Moon’. It is intended for a Year 6 class, though a comparison with an un-alike text is not explicitly suggested in the Power of Reading unit. The story the resource is based on, ‘The Golden Bracelet’, has similarities with the Norwegian story but it is mostly the differences that underline and draw out the fairy tale features.

It is a US picture book set in ancient Armenia and based on a story written down in the 19th century by Ghazaros Aghayan, an Armenian writer. I was trying to think of Lost Husband stories and kept coming back to this one. The thing is, though there is a lost husband, the story as told here is not a fairy tale. It can be found in an Aghayan collection called ‘Fables and Fairy Tales’ and it tells more like a fable in this version by David Kherdian.

The story has been animated (in Armenian) recently, and from the clips online it seems that there is a lot more magic in it than in the Kherdian version. However, I’m going with the Kherdian book as a down-to-earth comparison with ‘East of the Sun West of the Moon’.

A still from a 2014 animation of The Golden Bracelet story, ‘Anahit’

The picture at the top of this post illustrates very well the difference between Anahit and the lassie of ‘East of the Sun West of the Moon’: Anahit is a queen with practical tools at her disposal. The point of ‘The Golden Bracelet’ is that Anahit values practical action above all, and it is this that saves the day.

There are lots of different ways to approach a compare/contrast exercise. Click here for mine, which sets the magical against the realistic.

P.S. Anahit gets the ‘Rejected Princesses’ ( or Women too Awesome, Awful, or Offbeat for Kids’ Movies) treatment here, with the sub-heading ‘The Queen Who Made the King Get a Job’. It also has a link to the entire animated film.